Page 3 of Knot So Fast
To drive fast.
Hard.
So dangerously it shakes every other emotion out of your system until all that's left is speed and steel and the pure, unadulterated rush of cheating death. It's the only time my brain goes quiet, when I'm moving so fast that survival instinct takes over and drowns out everything else.
The road ahead curves sharply, following the coastline, and I take it without slowing down. The Ferrari's tires scream against the asphalt, but they hold. They always hold. These cars are built for this—for pushing boundaries, for dancing on the edge of disaster.
Just like me.
My phone rings again. And again. I ignore it every time, letting Lucius's ringtone become just another sound in the symphony of engine noise and wind and my own wild heartbeat. Let him panic…worry…let him fucking feel even a fraction of what he puts me through every single day just by existing in my orbit like a gravitational force I can't escape.
The speedometer hits 120, then 130.
The world outside becomes a blur of motion and light, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
This is what flying must feel like—this sensation of being untethered from everything solid and real.
It's not until a new ringtone roars to life that I freeze. This one's different. This one pierces through the madness like a blade through silk, cutting straight to my core in a way that makes my chest tighten and my hands shake on the steering wheel.
Lachlan.
The one Alpha who, no matter how many times I shut him out, always finds a way to get through.
The one who never yells, never breaks things, never loses control the way his brother does.
The one whose calm is somehow more devastating than Lucius's rage because it makes me want to lean into it, trust it, believe that maybe not everything has to be a battlefield.
My fingers press the button before my mind can catch up, muscle memory overriding logic.
Before I can speak, there's his voice filling the car—velvet and firm and so different from his twin brother because it's not laced with pulverizing anger. It's laced with a level of calm that only riles me up even more because how dare he be steady when I'm falling apart?
"Where are you?"
Three simple words, but they hit me.
I want to laugh at the audacity of the question, at the assumption that I owe him an answer when his brother just?—
The sound that leaves my trembling lips is caught somewhere between a sob and pure audacity.
I don't know if it's tears or blood running down my cheek now—probably both—but my whole body is shaking and I can't fucking answer. The words are stuck in my throat like glass shards.
"Auren, baby." His voice drops lower, more commanding, with that Alpha authority that makes my Omega want to roll over and submit even when every other part of me is screaming rebellion. "If my brother lost his shit and hurt you, I'll kill him with my bare hands. But I need you to bealivewhen I reach you, so you're going to pull the car over and wait for me to get to you. Understand?"
I understand.
The words echo in my head, but I can't make my mouth form them.
He knows I understand—he can probably hear it in my breathing, in the way the engine noise changes as I unconsciously ease off the gas at the sound of his voice. But maybe it's the hyperventilating that's frightening him. Or me.
The speedometer drops to 110, then 100. Still way too fast for these roads, but something about his voice makes my foot want to cooperate.
"Baby girl," he's pleading now, and that breaks something in me because Lachlan Wolfe doesn't plead.He commands. He takes charge.He fixes things with that infuriating calm competence that makes me want to either worship him or destroy him. "Come back to me. Please."
I've heard him beg exactly twice in this lifetime.
Once when I was sixteen, having drowned and been brought back to life over a stupid dare gone wrong—him pounding onmy chest, breathing life back into my lungs while tears streamed down his face. Once when I almost lost it all on the track when I was close to being burned to ash, trapped in a car that was becoming my funeral pyre until he pulled me out with his bare hands.
Both life-and-death situations.
